


A Choreography Of Broken Hearts

by lisachan



Series: Leoverse [166]
Category: Glee
Genre: Angst, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-17
Updated: 2018-02-17
Packaged: 2019-03-20 06:42:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,702
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13712079
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lisachan/pseuds/lisachan
Summary: Pete is proud of being a Keeper and he's always happy when he manages to bring Blaine and Leo together. But sometimes his broken heart betrays him, and he longs to be with those who are like him, in some way or another.





	A Choreography Of Broken Hearts

**Author's Note:**

> **WARNING:** This story is a spin-off sequel for Broken Heart Syndrome. This means that it depicts things happening way late in the 'verse, and that may be on varying degrees of spoiler.  
>  At some point, way late in the series, the various universes we've created will start to collapse and crash into one another. This story is about Pete feeling very sad and visiting a few of these instances to bring us pain.  
> Written for this week's COW-T #8 on prompt "three saddest mathematics love stories": tangent lines, which met and then parted forever, parallel lines, which never got a chance to even meet, and asymptotes, which could get closer and closer and closer but finally could never be together.  
> Only the best quality tragic love stories by yours truly. *flashsmiles*

There’s a garden close to the city hall, on the planet where Pete was born. And inside this garden there’s a small pool of water, barely a pond, really. The legend says – but is it really a legend when you know it’s the truth? – that when one of his kind looks at themselves in the mirror of those waters, they see the person they’re destined to love.

It happened to him. Back when he was nothing but a child, five years old, not a day more, his mom brought him to that garden. The sun was setting and her beautiful red hair were alive with its fire. She told him when she was younger she had looked in there, and she had seen his father. So Pete had looked inside too, and he had seen a boy. Dark haired, with wide wild curls, and with the bluest eyes. “Who do you see?” his mom asked. “I don’t know,” he answered honestly. But he lived every day from that hoping the dark haired stranger would somehow come his way.

It had been majorly ironic – and majorly heartbreaking – to find Leo in the universe he was assigned to protect. Even worse, he found out Leo was one of the two main axes around which the world revolved, the other being Blaine, the man _Leo_ was destined to love, lest their universe, and all those connected to it, crumbled to pieces.

A Keeper is not supposed to fall in love with the person he should try his best to pair with someone else. And yet, it had happened to him, and that was how Pete had to learn that love is sometimes cruel, that destiny doesn’t always mean what’s best for you and that some love stories, had they no one to protect them, would be bound to a tragic end.

That was also, though, how he learned about the importance of love, a force that by itself can destroy a universe, and how he reconsidered his luck in becoming the Keeper of such an ideal. When he was freshly out of school, during his first year of Keeping, he used to get together with his friends and envy them: they all had universes the foundations of which were revolutions, kingdoms rising and falling, wars, outstanding characters changing the course of history. They never had to protect two people smooching, or to make sure, by doing the worse they could conceive of, that one of their axes didn’t meet a cute boy who would make their heads spin, putting his relationship with the other in jeopardy. They had to protect genial scientists by murder attempts. They had to conspire together with the greatest men of their kind to start a revolution to free a people or a nation. They had to inspire characters who would become heroes, make sure their fulfilled their destinies and became the awesome people their universe expected them to become.

There he was, instead. Stuck lusting after Leo while forcing him between Blaine’s arms whenever they, for some reason, didn’t end up wrapped together on their own.

But through the years he has seen the power of love. He has seen how its strength can draw people together, and be the very spark of a revolution that can save millions. He has seen how it can save entire villages, he has seen how it can conjure the gods, and he has seen the most marvelous of miracles – how it can mend the heart of a person, how yes, it is possible that it breaks it, but it can also fix it. There’s nothing harder than fixing a brother heart, and love is the only power in the world that can do that.

Yet, love has not been able to do that for him. His heart is still broken, it broke the moment he recognized in Leo the face in the pond, and it remained broken despite the millions attempts – sometimes successful – in getting closer to him. Now he knows Leo and Leo knows him. He has a lasting relationship with the young man he’s become, and he’s proud to call himself one of his friends.

But he’s still Blaine’s. And Pete loves his job, he loves being a Keeper, and whenever he manages to save a universe, or even a single instance of it, he’s proud of himself and he knows he has value.

But it can be so painful. So frustrating. To be the witness of such a powerful love like Leo and Blaine’s winning against all odds over and over and over again. Their hearts are always bound to be mended and he’s supposed to make sure that happens every single time, but what about his heart? What about Pete?

That’s why sometimes he lets Leo and Blaine go. He wanders the instances of his universe to find specific moments in time and space where his heart can find solace in the knowledge that he isn’t the only one suffering. 

He’s in a bar, now, it’s early in the morning and the place is almost empty. There’s a man in his forties sitting at one of the tables, dark blonde hair, strong built, a fascinating square jaw, and sitting across him his young lover, bright dyed silver blonde hair, icy green eyes, pale peach-colored lips pursed in a disappointed pout. He was just forbidden to cover pancakes in Nutella. “Pancakes should only be eaten with maple syrup, you little savage.”

They’re called Alan and Jesse. In this instance of the universe, as in every other except for the original one, Alan is Blaine’s best friend. They’re not supposed to meet today, and they still won’t, but Alan’s going to try, because Blaine’s sick, he’s been sick for a while and he will call from the hospital in five minutes, and Alan will straddle his motorbike and rush to his side.

And then he will be involved in a car crash, and he will die. And the last thing Jesse will share with him will be a pouty smile, and refusing to say “I love you back” because Alan wouldn’t allow a puny whim.

Regret his going to follow him, like a rabid dog biting at his ankles, for years after Alan’s death.

Pete stands up from the chair – now he’s at a frat party, leaning against the wall in a corner, drinking some beer, trying to disappear in the crowd of half-drunk, half-high students filling up the house. Leo’s there – he’s already wasted, of course. Adam’s scolding him and Leo cannot hear him. Part of it is that he’s drunk. Part of it is that he’s not okay.

Blaine and him broke up a couple months ago in Dublin. Facing how little Blaine believed in the survival against time of their relationship, Leo opted out, and came back to Lima with a half-empty backpack and a broken heart. Adam was there for him, but Leo wanted from him more than Adam could afford to give, and in a month they were broken up too – luckily they have friendship, though, one of those friendships that not even having sex and not working between the sheets can destroy.

In the original universe, that’s how Leo meets Meredith. Or better, how Meredith meets him again after meeting him already once, when they were nothing but kids on a cruise ship. She sees him in the crowd, she’s attracted by the broken chips of his heart like so often happens and she decides to approach him – but she’s too smart to do it at the party, she will wait for a more favorable moment, and that reveals to be a winning choice, because in an afternoon Leo’s entranced with her, and the two years that follow that are probably the healthiest of his life.

That won’t happen here, though. In this instance, Meredith’s friend’s car broke down. They were supposed to be here tonight but they won’t make it. She won’t see Leo. She won’t remember him. Leo will bring someone new home tonight, and she will be someone inconsequential. He will use her. He will forget her. Then, night after night, he will use and forget dozens more boys and girls, and the next two years will be the most chaotic and dirty of his life. 

Pete walks away from the wall and he’s behind the scenes at the New Amsterdam Theatre in New York. He mingles with the workers carrying away props and costumes and he takes a glimpse of Cody coming in through a side entrance. Blaine was eagerly waiting for him – this is the original instance, that’s as close as Pete feels allowed to go to the heartache, at least for today.

Blaine and Cody have been seeing each other for a week or so already. They met after one of Blaine’s shows, Cody’s a guest in a friend’s house downtown, and being both part of Leo’s past brought them together. But there’s something happening, something that scares Cody – they’re growing too close. Now they expect each other, they anticipate meeting, they ache to give and receive kisses, Blaine wakes up thinking it’s good that he’s going to put his hands on Cody in the evening and Cody walks out of his friend’s house feeling his insides tingle at the thought.

In three or four days more, the tingling will become so intense Cody will fear he’s falling in love again. Terrified by it, he will run away, booking a ticket for the first available flight to Florence and leaving New York without even saying goodbye. A part of Blaine’s heart will never recover from that. From such closeness ending so abruptly. For the hope in what he could’ve been being shattered carelessly like that.

Blaine and Leo are always destined to be together, yes. Always destined to finally be happy. And that’s good. That’s great, really. But around them there’s a choreography of broken hearts. A whirlwind of was for a moment and never would’ve been again, of could’ve been but never were, of almost were but just not quite.

Pete is among them. He’s all of them. And sometimes it feels good to remember he’s not alone.


End file.
